The CBD Goods From Flora's Bake Shop Won't Get You Baked

Medical marijuana’s CBD craze has shown no signs of slowing down, with high-CBD strains and pure-CBD oils in nearly every dispensary in Colorado — but where are the CBD edibles? A Denver-area couple says they're ready to fill that void, and they don’t need a dispensary — or even a license from the Marijuana Enforcement Division — to sell their goods.

Flora’s Bake Shop in Lakewood isn’t much different from your average startup cottage bakery: a motivated couple trying to share their beloved Grandma Flora’s pastry and pie recipes by filling online orders and setting up at local farmers' markets. You’ve probably heard it before — only this time, some of Grandma Flora’s recipes have cannabis in them.

Not the skunky cannabis with names like Alaskan Thunderf*ck or Durban Poison, but good ol’ hemp, which in this case contains only .03 percent THC to a whopping 15 percent CBD.

“When I first moved here, I wanted to dabble in [infused] baked goods, but the MED and the MIPs [Marijuana Infused Product licenses] make it nearly impossible to do it,” says Flora’s founder Chris Bedrosian. “You need to have deep pockets, commercial baking space, a MIP. It's just too difficult.”

Hemp's low THC content enables more businesses to work with it.

Courtesy of Flora's Bake Shop

Bedrosian and her partner, Harry, moved to Lakewood last March after unsuccessfully campaigning the city of Boise, Idaho, to let them to continue living in their traditional cottage bakery. Their next move, Bedrosian says, was to head somewhere new. And like many of Colorado’s recent transplants, cannabis was a factor.

“We had a storefront bakery and tried for six months to continue to live upstairs, and the city wouldn't let us do it,” she says of her Boise setup. “ So we decided that if they won't let us do it, we'll go somewhere that does and somewhere that has legal marijuana.”

After struggling with what direction to take her traditional bakery after arriving in Colorado, Bedrosian says she found her calling at a recent marijuana expo that showcased the medical effects of cannabidiol, or CBD, which has become a rising medicinal option in recent years for its claimed effects against epileptic seizures, inflammation, chronic pain and other conditions. After a little research, she decided to intertwine the plant compound into her baked goods, which she put on the market earlier this month.

Because of hemp’s extremely low THC content, companies that infuse it into their foods don’t need to worry about the many obstacles marijuana companies must deal with to sell high-CBD/low-THC products grown in licensed marijuana cultivation facilities.

If you like this story, consider signing up for our email newsletters.

Thomas Mitchell has written about all things cannabis for Westword since 2014, covering sports, real estate and general news along the way for publications such as the Arizona Republic, Inman and Fox Sports. He's currently the cannabis editor for westword.com.